Introducing the Novena: a homemade laptop with open source hardware

Is your laptop secure? In the age of widespread snooping from
the NSA and so many others, do you really know that your machine is
safe? Is every part of it steeled against attack from miscreants
across the web? Those may seem like questions born from paranoia.
But recent revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden
have shown us that, in many ways, we're right to be paranoid.

Many are working to ensure that the software on your laptop is
secure. Just this week, Mozilla called for engineers across the
globe to audit its open source Firefox web browser, hoping to prove
that it hasn't been compromised by the NSA or anyone else. And you
can easily put your faith in an operating system like Linux. It too
is open source, with countless eyes constantly looking over its
code.

But what about the hardware inside your laptop? What's
going with all those tiny circuits on the motherboard? Or in the
firmware that controls the motherboard and other low-level parts?
All that is closed source. The rest of the world can't help you
there.

That's why Sean "xobs" Cross and Bunnie Huang embarked on what
they call Project Novena, building a homemade laptop with open
source hardware -- hardware whose specs are freely available to
everyone. Or at least, that's partly why they built it. They also
wanted to have some fun. As Huang puts it, they wanted to "learn
new things while making something we would actually use on a daily
basis."

And they want others to use it too. According to Huang, the pair
are planning a crowdfunding campaign to finance a more friendly
version of their open source laptop. In the meantime, you can find
the specs and case designs on the
project's wiki and use them to build your own.

Cross and Huang are the founders of Sutajio
Ko-Usagi, a hardware company based in Singapore. The two met
while working at Chumby,
an internet appliance outfit co-founded by Huang, and in the years
since, they've worked on countless boutique hardware projects,
ranging from the Safecast open source Geiger
counter to the Kovan robot controller. Most recently, at the Chaos
Computer Congress event in Germany, the duo demonstrated a host of
security vulnerabilities they've found in various SD cards -- and
they gave this presentation on the Novena.

"The motherboard, battery board, and display adapter board are
designs from whole cloth," Huang says of the machine. "Every trace
on those PCBs was placed by my hand." They also designed the case,
which includes several components that you can print from a 3D
printer. And instead of proprietary firmware, they used the open
source Das
U-Boot.

It's not the fastest or the most portable of laptops. Equipped
with 4GB of Ram and an ARM processor you're more likely to find in
a cell phone, it offers the power of the average netbook, but it's
the size and weight of a budget laptop from the middle aughts.
"It's no feather," Huang says.

But what the Novena lacks in modernity it makes up for in
transparency. "If you see something suspicious in the hardware, you
have the opportunity to look it up in the reference schematics and
see if it really is a cause for concern," Huang explains. In other
words: you can check for NSA backdoors.

But not every piece of hardware inside the Novena is open
source. The screen, keyboard, hard drive, power supply, and
processor were all purchased off the shelf, and it's powered by a
hacked RC car battery pack.

For now, the Novena is probably as close as it gets to a truly
open source laptop, but there are other options. For those willing
to live with a proprietary graphics driver, there are a few do-it-yourself laptop designs that use the open source Raspberry Pi
board. And for those who want something that works out of the box,
there's Gluglug's customised Thinkpad x60, which uses an open source firmware
called Coreboot.

None of these machines can compete with the style and the power
of a MacBook Air, but each offers something Apple probably never
will: near complete control over just about everything. Not
something you want? You're missing out on the fun.